Marketing Commentary from interlinkONE
Multi-channel marketing communications - all in one!
Smart Marketing Made Simple
Posted by 
on Monday, December 28, 2009 
at 11:27 AM 
in Smart Marketing is simple. Follow these 7 simple marketing steps for success!
Step:
- Review your target audience and be sure they match up to your product or service.
- Communicate with your target audience in the multiple marketing channels they communicate in (Social Media, Print, Electronic).
- Use the Marketing Medias (Mailers, Ad’s, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Email) and personalize the message where applicable.
- Integrate response mechanisms (QRCodes, PURLS , Web forms, 1-800) that are relevant to the audience, channel and media in use.
- Perform lead generation (Nurture).
- Measure, Measure, Measure.
- Repeat.
Tags Easily Manage Your Personalized URLs
With the interlinkONE marketing software, you have the ability to easily create, manage, execute, and measure marketing efforts that utilize Personalized URLs.
We recently released an enhancement to our ilinkONE Version 8 software to make it easier than ever for you to do the “manage” part successfully.
Here are a few of the enhancements that should make your job easier:
Quickly Access Action Buttons
We have added shortcuts to the most commonly used buttons on the “Manage Personalized URLs” page. Upon accessing that page, you will now have immediate access to buttons that allow you to export your list, view and clean-up duplicate records, as well as to simply browse through your list of personalized URLs.
Paging through large lists of Personalized URLs
Over the years, we have seen interlinkONE customers execute Personalized URL campaigns that included millions of records. Thus, to ensure that you can always quickly access the features you need regardless of the size of the campaign, we have added improved paging logic to help you browse through your lists of Personalized URLs.
Quick Edit and Deletion
After uploading a mailing list and clicking the “Generate Personalized URLs” button, you may take a moment to review the list of PURLs that were created. If you need to make a change to any of the records, you can quickly do so directly on the Manage page. For example, simply click on a record, and the system will switch into “edit” mode. Enter the revised Personalized URL, and the change will be saved in the database instantly. Or, click the Delete icon to remove a record from the list of Personalized URLs.
Here is a screenshot of the Manage Personalized URLs page:
Manage Your Personalized URLs
Drip Marketing
Drip Marketing – that term may not yet have a page on Wikipedia (although I did find E-Mail Drip Marketing), but it’s absolutely something that should be discussed as a marketing tactic.
The term “drip” alone may not always have the most positive connotations. Perhaps you think of standing under a roof somewhere, and a consistent drip of water keeps dropping on your head.
Well, there is a key word in that sentence — consistent.
A marketing department may bring in a ton of leads for a sales team. The sales force may try to follow-up with all leads. Sometimes that happens. But oftentimes, a lead will get missed. But even if the each lead is followed up one time, is that number, “one”, really enough?
Many products and services have a long sales cycle. Along with bringing in leads, marketing departments have a responsibility to help sales teams successfully push a prospect through that cycle. When it ends, the prospect will be perfectly primed to be converted into a customer.
A drip campaign can be effective. But, just like the water running off a roof, it can also become annoying. Here are a few key things in mind to run an effective drip marketing campaign:
- Mix up your channels and medias
- Provide relevant content
- Turn down the sales pitch
- Be considerate of timing
Mix up your channels and medias - this takes effort, but it’s essential. It may be easy to simply send an email each week to a person. But you risk becoming viewed as spam. There are plenty of other channels that can be used. Is the person on Twitter, or LinkedIn? If so, send them a message through that social media channel. Send an email one week… then a social media message on week 2. Then in week 3, mail out a hand-written letter.
Provide relevant content – One wonderful thing about a drip campaign is that it can be automated. However, that doesn’t mean that every person should get the same exact piece. When they first opted into your materials, hopefully they were prompted to provide some details about them. Or perhaps you already have some marketing knowledge of them in your database. If so, put it to use! If they expressed an interest in “reducing costs”, make sure the “save money with us” link is prominent in the first email you send to them.
One great way to deliver relevant content is with personalized URLs. They are often used to generate leads. But they can work great when you need to deliver relevant materials to someone that has already responded.
Turn down the sales pitch – This may not be easy to do. Perhaps you want to shout about all the wonderful things that your product or service can do each time you talk to someone. But if you are going to “hit” them with materials 7-10 times, they can’t all be sales-y. You’ll fail. Rather, serve to educate… If you find a great article in an industry publication, share it. Simply say “I thought you’d find this informative, and helpful to your business”. Don’t say anything about your product or service. People want to know that you care about them. This is one way to prove it.
Be considerate of timing - This goes both ways. Are you sending a mailer that will end up in the day-after-July-4th pile? If so, well….. you probably should have saved the stamp. But be especially considerate of your prospect. Do you know that they recently went on vacation? Or are attending a trade show? If so, you may need to hold back the next email/letter/message a few days. Show consideration, and you’ll increase the chances that someone will pay attention to what you have to say.
Don’t Fear the Data
I was recently was reading a great discussion in The Digital Nirvana. The topic was personalized URLs and one-to-one marketing.
One of the posts was in regards to reasons why some personalized URL campaigns produce very low response rates. The reason listed in this post was the data — that clients were providing a list that only contained names and mailing address. In those scenarios, a personalized URL could be created. But then the only unique part about their landing page was the “Dear [FirstName]” line.
Well, one thing to acknowledge is that personalized URLs are not the best fit for every campaign. You need to consider the data you have, but also the demographics of the target audience, the timing, the offer, etc.
However, if you only have a list of names and mailing addresses, does this mean that you should never do personalized URLs?
The answer to this should be a resounding “No”!
For one, if you are trying to show off that you can do personalized URLs, simply sending out a simple postcard containing one may catch the attention of a customer that does have great marketing data… and they may be able to see the value you can offer by combining your marketing services with their data.
Also, with a bit of creativity, you can add a “personal” twist to what seems like the most mundane data list. Here are a few examples:
- Distance – We recently saw a campaign that was for a gym. The customer used an online program to calculate the distance from each recipients house to the gym. Then, they converted the mileage into steps. Thus, the postcard and landing page all displayed the following – “[FirstName] – you are only #xxx steps away from achieving your fitness goals”
- Location – This one would work best when you are doing a mailing that targets contacts across multiple states. Maybe you put the State seal on the appropriate mailer or landing page. Or perhaps you display an image or colors related to a popular sports team in that State.
- Gender – This one might be a bit too sensitive – but, we have seen campaigns where users displayed different images and offers based on a person’s gender (which was determined by looking at the Prefix field)
These are just a few examples of how you can use name and address data to add personalization to a campaign.
Here is one more way that you could demonstrate the personalization capabilities that you have:
- When the user gets to the landing page, let them know they are about to experience personalization in action… Sell it as an interactive tool.
- Have them answer a few basic questions. Perhaps, “what is your favorite color?”, “favorite food?”, and “favorite time of day”? These questions would be dropdowns – thus, there is a fixed amount of answers.
- Upon clicking Submit, present the user with a landing page that is custom, based on the answers they provided to those 3 questions.
(We actually have a “test drive” set up that works similar to this on our website… Check it out here: http://www.webfulfillment.com/ilinkno/lp.asp?L=118)
